Originally Posted by
Merkin Berfel
Look for a used Yamaha DSP-A1. It may be 10 years past state of the art but it's still a pretty solid performer. They sold for about $2500 new but you should be able to find one for about $600. Some of the digital soundfield hallucinations are kinda hokey but the cinema soundfields are great.
The two biggest limitations are the lack of support for a rear center speaker and the S-VHS video outputs. At this point I'd rather have the audio part of my HT together than the video. Unless you're using a 6' video screen I would think S-VHS would be more than adequate, especially with decent cables like Monster video 2 or 3.